Targeting the Bengali-speaking Muslim community of Assam, chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma stated on Tuesday that they should not be allowed to vote in India and should cast their ballots in neighbouring Bangladesh instead.
“As per rules, Miyas (a pejorative term for the community) should not get to vote here, they should cast their ballots in Bangladesh. To ensure that they don’t get to vote in Assam we have taken certain measures,” Sarma said in Mahmara in Charaideo district, talking to reporters on the sidelines of an event.
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“Once special intensive revision (SIR) is undertaken in Assam, we will have to delete 400,000-500,000 of their names (from the voter rolls),” he said.
To be sure, Assam is only conducting a special revision (SR), which is different from SIR in several ways — unlike SIR, no verification of document is done by booth-level officers, there is no scrutiny in the link drawn by a citizen to the base voter roll, and officials only distribute enumeration forms house to house. “Congress may abuse me as much as they want, but my job is to make Miyas uncomfortable..,” Sarma added.
The Election Commission is carrying out an SR and not an SIR is because the process of updating the National Register of Citizens, an initiative unique to the state to weed out illegal foreigners, is not complete yet.
EC published the draft electoral rolls on December 27 listing 25.1 million electors in the state; it added that during a door-to-door verification 478,992 electors were found to have died, 523,680 shifted, and that 53, 619 were found to have multiple entries. The period for filing claims and objections for the draft ended on January 22. Those will be disposed by February 2 and the final rolls published on Feb 10.
On Sunday, several opposition parties in Assam, including the Congress, alleged gross anomalies, unlawful interference and arbitrary bulk notices during the ongoing SR of electoral rolls and urged EC to act. Leaders of the Congress, Raijor Dal, Assam Jatiya Parishad and CPI(M), who are planning to contest the assembly elections that will be held early this summer as an alliance against the ruling NDA in, submitted a memorandum to the chief electoral officer of Assam and stated that EC’s “immediate intervention and action” was necessary to ensure that the SR exercise is “free and fair” and names of genuine voters don’t get left out from the final electoral rolls.
“To ensure they stay in power, the BJP is even trying to manipulate the voters list during the SR process, which is being undertaken by the EC,” Lok Sabha MP and Assam Congress president Gaurav Gogoi said.
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